Principle of Exploits Based on Buffer Over-Flow Attacks
The world has experienced a massive technological improvement in recent years and the use of computers is the current norm of the day. This has opened up an opportunity for attackers to hack and enact action in the victim gadgets. The hackers have taken advantage of buffer overflow to access personal details. Nevertheless, measures can be incorporated to avoid buffer overflow attacks.
Buffer over-flow has been exploited by attackers in enabling them to gain unauthorized access to personalized computers. The buffer overflow occurs when the data keyed in exceeds the buffer memory. This will drive the exceeded data to overwrite in the adjacent storage hence corrupting the data that is already allocated in the adjacent location. Attackers have taken advantage of the susceptibility involved with buffer overflow to gain access to vulnerable machines and execute commands of their choice. Buffer overflow vulnerability exists when the program can overwrite more data than it was designed to hold (Alhabi and Lin, 2016) They intentionally send an exceeded data that the program is incapable of holding, to the vulnerable machine forcing the system to crash allowing them to maneuver the coding error, therefore, gaining ability to execute commands of their choice in the victim machine.
To avoid buffer overflow attacks, the system developers can avoid library functions that are not bound checked or rather incorporate less vulnerable machine languages: Java, Peal, C#, and Javascript. In uncontrollable languages like C and C++, programmers are required to precisely and accurately deal with data manipulation without any room of assumption as a slight mistake may lead to system vulnerability creating an opportunity for attackers to gain access. (Ye en al, 2016) Additionally, personal measures can be taken by individuals, system administrators, and security personnel. The system administrators should ensure that the computer systems are always patched. On top of this, ensure that the publicly available systems have configurations with a minimum of unnecessary services and soft wares extras. The majority of the people are greatly concerned with the incoming traffic in their system however it is important to control the outgoing traffic from your system because attackers can identify a weakness in this path and exploit it to send an outgoing connection granting them access to the system.
In conclusion, buffer over-flow has been significantly exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access to computers. It is important to embrace the measures against buffer overflow attacks to establish security against cybercrimes.
References
AlHarbi, K. N., & Lin, X. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,251,373. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Ye, T., Zhang, L., Wang, L., & Li, X. (2016, April). An empirical study on detecting and fixing buffer overflow bugs. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST) (pp. 91-101). IEEE.